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Unauthorised email sent from my colleague's account.

A colleague at work mentioned that he got one of those mail administrator returned mail emails about an email that he never sent. I told him to just change his account password, although he's convinced there's actually a hacker trying to use his email account. Is there any basis to his fears and does he need to wipe his entire system and start again with the same account password as he seems to think? What should I suggest he do?

LAMER: has a virus, the virus sends mail to CORP faking the from adress to JOHNs email adress.
CORP: receives mail, sees it as a virus and sends a notification to JOHN
JOHN: receives mail from CORP and gets mad.. I didn't send that..

Now who's fault is it ??
LAMERs fault for getting infected with a virus (and his ISP for letting him send the mails)
CORPs fault for sending one of those notifications..

A colleague at work mentioned that he got one of those mail administrator returned mail emails about an email that he never sent. I told him to just change his account password, although he's convinced there's actually a hacker trying to use his email account.

It is possible.

Is there any basis to his fears and does he need to wipe his entire system and start again with the same account password as he seems to think? What should I suggest he do?

He could be right on the money. At work we had the same exact issue and the "IT Tech" told the guy just to change his password sad to say the next day it happened again. I would recommend just creating a new email address for him.

Just ignore it. Eventually the person with the virus will get sorted out.

I wouldn't just ignore it. All this will do is piss off the guy who clearly thinks

he's convinced there's actually a hacker trying to use his email account.

And the IT Tech is just "ignoring the issue," Kill two birds with one stone. Get rid of the lamer who is using his email account and second, make the worker happy by changing his email address to something he likes that way it (makes it look like you did something for him) and should easily resolve the other issue he was having. If worse comes to worse can't you just delete that specific email address that has been so called hacked, and create a new one? I think this would be better than

need to wipe his entire system and start again with the same account password as he seems to think?

If you were going to reformat the harddrive resinstall windows go back on and use the same account information that would be pointless to do.

Mostly we ignore it...but I do check the machine or account....change passwords etc

I also try and get a copy of the email or headers...to determine where its coming from.

We have it happen here...shows internal user is sending internal email virus to other users.....looking at the header...shows its coming from outside...the local cable smtp server..........which is not the ISP we use.............spoofed.

MLF

How people treat you is their karma- how you react is yours-Wayne Dyer